jinn-y:

Thank you! :>

My initial advice is to practice! The transition from traditional drawing/animating to digital is bumpy, but with lots of practice, it becomes just as natural as drawing in a sketchbook is.

Now, I’m going to give some more general advice for dealing with Photoshop, and tricks/hotkeys to make the experience easier.

^ These are my suggestions for setting up your PS. These windows are pretty much the only ones I ever use, and they’re best for sketching. They are:

Brush, Brush Presets, Color, Layers, Navigator, and Swatches. For my Color window, I typically set it to Grayscale (using the righthand corner dropdown menu in the window).

Useful Hotkeys

These are the ones I use nearly every time I’m working in the program:

• B - Brush
  
• E - Eraser - Hold down while using the Brush Tool for quick erasing
• L - Lasso Tool
• G - Fill Bucket Tool
• C - Crop Tool
• T - Text Tool
• I - Eyedropper Tool
• W - Magic Wand Tool
• M - Marquee Selection Tool
• Ctrl (or) V - Move Tool
• Ctrl + Alt -  Dragging while holding these two keys will duplicate whatever is on your current layer.
• Ctrl + A - Selects the entire canvas
• Ctrl + D - Deselects whatever is selected
• Ctrl + X - Cut
• Ctrl + C - Copies everything selected (one layer only)
• Ctrl + Shift + C - Copies everything selected (all layers)
• Ctrl + E - Deletes current layer
• Ctrl + J - Duplicates current layer
• Alt - Holding Alt and clicking while hovering in between two layers will turn the top layer into a clipping mask of the one below it. Really useful for coloring.
• Alt - Holding Alt while using the Brush Tool will turn your cursor into the eyedropper tool.
• Shift - Holding Shift while using the Move Tool with cause whatever you’re moving to only move on the x and y axis of the canvas.
• Ctrl + U - Brings up Hue/Saturation editor
• Ctrl + L - Brings up the Levels editor
• Ctrl + S - Save
• Ctrl + Shift + S - Save as
• Ctrl + Z - Undo/Redo (once)
• Ctrl + Alt + Z - Undo (multiple)
• Ctrl + Shift + Z - Redo (multiple)

Brush settings are definitely something to experiment with, along with the many PS brushes that are available - and there are lots of awesome free PS brushes out there, too. Don’t forget - Pen Pressure is your best friend!

And, like I said before, practice is the best way to get used to PS. I suggest starting small, such as doodling circles and other simple things. It’s a good way to practice painting, too. You should try drawing and painting with as big of a brush size as possible. I find that it makes you looser and you don’t focus as much on those unnecessary details.

For cleaning up your sketches, layers are your best friends. Don’t forget that you can change the opacity on layers, too. If your sketch is too messy, just pop in a new layer, lower your sketch layer’s opacity, and draw over top of it on the new layer!

Suggestions

• Experiment with layer styles. Linear Burn, Multiply, Overlay, etc. Sometimes I even make a layer filled with a color such as orange or pink and set it to Overlay or Soft Light over my entire image to harmonize the colors.
  
• Try using the Sharpen/Blur filters to enhance your work.
• Use clipping masks for coloring lines, etc. A clipped layer only affects the information on the layer it’s clipping. So, if you had a layer that was only line art, you could make a clipping layer and use the fill bucket to change the color of all of your linework. Clipping layers are also useful for making color adjustments, etc.

That’s your crash course in Photoshop for today, anon! I hope that helped, and don’t be afraid to ask for more. :)